Monday, December 8, 2014

Yahoo, Bing gives you 'right to be forgotten'

Bing and Yahoo
has now joined Google in its willingness to scrub search results following the
"right to be forgotten" ruling last May.

Bing,
Microsoft's search engine, has rolled out its removal request function last
July which allows European nationals to submit "right to be
forgotten" requests but has only started the actual removals.

A spokesperson
from Microsoft said, "We've begun processing requests as a result of the
court's ruling and in accordance with the guidance from European data
protection authorities. While we're still refining that process, our goal is to
strike a satisfactory balance between individual privacy interests and the
public's interest in free expression."

Reputation VIP,
a French reputation management company responsible for the site forget.me which
helps users make deletion requests on search engines, confirmed that Bing has
now started to respond and implement
requests for link removals.

Meanwhile,
Yahoo whose search engines is really 'powered by Bing' naturally followed suit.
According to their spokesperon: "In response to a May 2014 decision by the
Court of Justice of the European Union, European residents can request that
Yahoo block certain search results in Europe. Requests can be submitted through
our intake form. We will carefully evaluate each request with the goal of
balancing the individual's right to privacy with considerations of the public's
right to information."

Currently, only
European residents can ask search engines to stop from coughing up results
related to their name. The controversial ruling by the EU's Court
of Justice, dubbed as the "right to be forgotten", requires search
engines to remove links to content that are "inadequate, irrelevant or no
longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were
processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed". It was made when a man from Spain filed a lawsuit
against Google regarding the removal of links connected to his name.

When the ruling
gained public attention, Google was promptly flooded with removal requests.
According to its Transparency Report it got over 174,000 "right to be
forgotten" requests as of November.
It is the primary affected party in the ruling as it commands around 90%
of all the search requests, compared to the combined shares of Yahoo and Bing.
More than 70% of the deletion requests sent through Forget.me is for Google but
apparently, only a third of those is granted.

At present,
link removals are being done only in local version such as google.co.uk and not on the main site
google.com. Data regulators from Europe are expecting that Google and the
others will eventually apply such removals globally as well and are pushing for
the implementation of link removals on all the relevant domains of the search
engine.

The group of
privacy regulators in Europe has already published a set of guidelines two
weeks ago, to serve as standards on how search engines ought to manage the
"right to be forgotten" requests. The new guidelines are expected to
be met unfavorably by the leading search engine firms and by privacy advocates.
The privacy regulators formed from 28 European countries drafted 13 guidelines
that, though not binding, will be utilized by the data protection department of
each involved country whenever needed.

As Christopher
Graham, UK data commissioner, said: "The polluter pays, the polluter
should clear up. Google is a massive commercial organisation making millions
and millions out of processing people's personal information. They're going to
have to do some tidying up."

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